Sellafield turns to BI to cope with data explosion

Nuclear services firm introduces new tools to help meet compliance demands of highly regulated sector

Sellafield manages nuclear waste

Nuclear services firm Sellafield is implementing business intelligence (BI) tools to improve staff productivity and enhance its response and conformance to the industry’s strict regulations.

The company is to use a BI application from Lawson Software, who provides the firm’s existing asset management system, to help analyse the large amounts of asset data it stores.

Sellafield has two sites, one in West Cumbria and one at Capenhurst in Cheshire, where it carries out complex decommissioning of the UK’s nuclear legacy, together with fuel recycling, manufacture and waste management.

"The decision to update our systems was purely an internal driver to have a modern supported system that could move our business forward in the future," said Sellafield site maintenance systems manager Richard Davison.

"The regulators were consulted during all phases of the project to give them assurance that what we were doing was compliant with regulations and would support the safety of the site."

Sellafield hopes to remove manual intervention from many of its maintenance and asset care processes, and estimates savings of £3m per annum due to improved employee productivity from the use of BI.

The nuclear firm rolled out Lawson’s asset management package in 2005, and now has 450,000 pieces of equipment registered on the system.

“We do about 160,000 maintenance jobs a year; you couldn't do this without IT," said Davison.

Currently technicians still record details on paper and transcribe information through newly developed data input screens.

"This halves the time needed to put job maintenance data into the system. Average that over 160,000 jobs and that's a significant saving," said Davison.

Future plans include using PDAs for transferring the data.

Because of its work in handling nuclear waste and old reactors, Sellafield operates in a highly regulated industry, so better access to data through BI is essential.

"The Nuclear Installations Inspectorate and the Environment Agency inspect us regularly and have a long term presence on the site. So being able to pull specific data out quickly is useful, not only for them, but for our own internal inspectors," said Davison.

The company’s BI installation has three components: A dashboard system, giving senior managers an overview of how critical systems are currently performing; a standard reporting system which could be used to send specific information across the site to different engineers; and the ability to set up “smart notifications” that alert engineers if parameters exceed preset thresholds.

Sellafield runs an Oracle database, with Lawson's SQL data warehousing system on top, importing data which can be polled by the BI package.

"You don't want to put too much pressure on the base transactional database by hitting for a lot of reports," said Davison.